I'll keep publishing

CRM – We binned SugarCRM last month because it became too time consuming to keep it up to date (it’s not very intuitive and ‘clunky to use, if you want a good CRM go here ) and the contracts support was terrible. I realised that running a SaaS business we needed a contract management system with some customer management features, not a CRM.

So we’ve built something simple in house, just 45 hours work with trusty PHP/Apache/MySQL. We now have a system a that tells us when contracts are close to renewal time, the revenue, costs and margin they give us. As a bonus the system calculates the upstream license fees to third party vendors (virus & spam for example) for active contracts.

That’s it, no complicated sales funnel, multi-stage lead-opp-close process, just simple tasks associated to each customer record, like ‘call’, ‘email’, ‘task’, ’support’ and that does us nicely.

We’ll add document attachments soon so quotes and invoices can be uploaded, that means we can ditch BaseCamp (tasks), Clearspace -(document management) as well as SugarCRM.

There’s a big upside in that we can continue to enhance the system to suit our own needs, being in IT  I suppose we’re lucky we have the in house skills.